


Closure

by orphan_account



Category: British Comedy RPF
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-11
Updated: 2014-06-11
Packaged: 2018-02-04 07:20:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1770490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two halves of a whole.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Closure

**Author's Note:**

> I loved Rik as much as anyone who ever grew up with his incredibly body... of work (obviously) could and I apologise deeply if anyone is offended by me writing this so soon after his death. I find solace in creative writing and it's the only way I can bring my own closure to this situation. I only hope it might bring closure to others.

Four full days passed before Adrian was left alone. 

Jennifer had been fluttering around him like a particularly concerned butterfly, finding all manner of small tasks to set him on, as if to divert his mind. Adrian had scrubbed the bathroom, cleaned the oven, mowed the entire garden (quite a feat, considering how fucking irritating new lawn mowers were to get going, and how spectacularly on fire the old one became shortly after Adrian abandoned the new Hyper-Mow-3000 for something he actually fucking understood). 

They had made plans for Jennifer to go visit the grandkids on the weekend to leave Adrian at home to write before anything at all had happened. Those were plans which Adrian insisted the family kept to, despite the fact he couldn’t even remember whether he was writing a play or a book, never mind the title or the theme. 

The first day alone, Adrian slept. 

Then, he woke. 

And almost immediately he fell asleep again. 

Woke.

Slept.

Woke.

Slept.

Woke again.

Took a piss (for variety’s sake).

Fell asleep again. 

When Jennifer called, Adrian said he had spent the day outside in the sunshine, laughing and drinking with a variety of different well-wishers and confidants who loved him very much. 

When Jennifer informed him it had been raining all day, Adrian pretended he was going through a tunnel, hissed into the receiver at a fair approximation of static and threw the land line at the wall.(1)

After another hour or so, Adrian found himself totally awake. Bladder empty, he was flummoxed to the cause until he felt another few heavy bumps from down by his feet. 

Blearily, he grabbed for his glasses on the side-table, and peered down the king size at what he expected to be the cat.

“Ade! Watch this, _knobhead!_ ” 

Not the cat, then. 

Rik bounced three more times on the bed before throwing himself forward in a mild parody of a forward flip, a parody which ended with him bouncing off the bed on his left shoulder and colliding with the dresser. Adrian blinked several times until Rik stood up and took a bow, throwing his hand to where the imaginary audience would be, and flicking them the Vs.

All Adrian knew was relief. 

It was close to nirvana. He could have wept, nearly did, clutching his forehead with one hand and throwing the other one back, falling onto his pillow. Rik was alive. It was all some giant fantastic fucking joke.

“Are you going back to sleep? Again?" Rik was flabbergasted. "Fucking hell! It’s beautiful outside!”

“It’s raining,” Adrian mumbled through a smile he couldn’t ever imagine leaving his face. 

Rik’s face came into his vision, his eyebrows knotted together. “Eh?”

“Raining. Arsehole.” The epithet for habit, rather than malice. “Falling liquid from the sky.”

“How in the name of buggery do you know?”

_Jennifer. Why was Jennifer telling me it was raining?_

For the first time, something in this situation seemed off to Adrian. He looked at Rik again, who had one hand on his hip, tapping his foot impatiently as he waited for Adrian to pay more attention to him. 

Adrian noticed for the first time the lack of wrinkles on Rik’s forehead, the presence of a thick, certain hairline. The eyes were the same (they always fucking were, like a play-doh cow that had been punched square in the face), but the waistband was at least two sizes sucked in.

“You know what?" Rik asked, not waiting for a response. "Fuck that _rain_ nonsense, if I wanted the weather report I'd suck off Michael Fish.”

“Golden showers,” Adrian muttered, the punchline to a joke that they hadn’t written yet. Something didn’t make sense, something really fucking important, but Adrian couldn’t put his finger on it. All that seemed to matter was that Rik was there and he was waiting for Adrian to get his arse out of bed. “Uh. Good to see you and all that gay shit, Rik, but what the fuck are you doing here?”

Rik grinned, focus on him. He twisted a strand of his hair ( _was it still really that length?_ ) around his finger and kicked out his hip. Spotlight firmly where it belonged.

“ _Well_ , you know I was just walking alongside your road, and then I thought ‘you know who deserves to go at take you to the pub, pay for all your drinks and then get squarely kicked in the knackers? Your old great mate Adrian Edmonson - you know, that bald day-time-telly twat with a girl’s name.’ And then I thought ‘Wow, Rik, that’s a bloody great idea isn’t it?’ ‘Why Rik,’ I then thought ‘How kind of you to say so? You know, it isn’t often I talk to someone with such wit, intelligence and sex-appeal as you.’”

Adrian watched, smiling, as Rik enacted his conversation as perfectly as if he was on stage, rather than to his single audience of one close-to-being-naked man in white briefs.(2) After what seemed an age of Rik talking to himself, Rik came to a stop, looking at Adrian curiously.

“You alright, knob-fuck? Usually you don’t let me go on this long.”

“Said the actress to the bishop,” Adrian replied, instinctively. When Rik looked at him strange again (not that there was a non-strange way for Rik to look at him), Adrian found himself kicking his feet over the side of the bed, wondering if there were sausages in the fridge and any clean socks. “I’m not going to the pub. I don’t want to get recognised.”

“You’re bloody strange,” Rik laughed. “Getting noticed is the _only_ way to, err, be noticed! Come on, let’s go tell posh birds we were on the beeb and see them cream their knickers as we tell them my great showbiz stories. Then we can get them to buy us loads of drinks and get completely wasted and write our names on their tits.”

_But Rik doesn’t drink. Not since -_

“Hellooo?” Rik waved his hand in front of Adrian’s face, making him snap out of his thoughts. “Earth to cretin? There is something wrong with you, isn’t there? You’ve got some sort of deathly sexually-transmitted disease. That’s why you’ve been in bed. You’ve got a psychopathic sickness. You’ve got the brain herpes.” Rik backed away, grimacing. “Eughhh.”

“Yes, Rik. I am sorry to inform you that your sainted mother has given me the death-clap. But no fear, there’s no way she could possibly spread it to your father, because I’m sure gonorrhoea can’t cross the species barrier.”

Adrian pulled on his trousers, before quickly flipping Rik off. Rik stalked over to him, sneering and stroking a hands through his hair. 

“Wanker,” Rik said. Adrian bared his teeth at him, tugging on a shirt. Rik flinched and Ade grinned. “Come on then,” Rik sighed, as if he were undertaking a great hardship. “If we _must_ be stuck in the Edmonson abode you could at least give me the grand tour. You know, t’lavvy. T’lounge. T’other lavvy that used to be the dining room before you shat all over it.”

“…Where do you think I live?”

“Ade,” Rik said, almost deathly serious, if not for the sarcastic pout on his face. “How dare you imply I give the tiniest shit about your life.”

-

So that was how Ade ended up sitting on his sofa, feet on his (previously pristine) glass table, 14 empty cans of import-lager crushed beneath his legs. 

Rik was perched on the other side of the sofa, picking aimlessly at some strands of cotton that were sticking out of his black tie. Ade’s vision had already started to go bleary, but in that nice drunk way that let ugly girls get a look in and five pound kebabs seem like a wise investment. 

Some boring shit had been on the telly for about three seconds before Rik insisted they watch something with him in it, and Ade had had to rummage around the sitting room for about half an hour before finding his free copies of The Young Ones that the BBC had thrown at them on production. After another five minutes re-learning how to drunkenly work the DVD player, Rik squealed at the splash screen and started to sing along to the theme tune.

“Your ego really could be seen from space, couldn’t it?” Ade laughed.

“ _Au contraire_. Tourists come from all a _w_ ound to see space from my ego.”

“A _w_ ound?” Adrian giggled, looking at Rik who was glaring at him. “A _w_ ound, _W_ ik?”

“Yes? Do you find something funny?”

Adrian snorted beer as he looked at how serious Rik’s face was. He waved a finger generally in his direction.

“Where’d you get that costume from, anyway?” Ade asked. Rik pushed his chest out, blazer curving into a more open V. Then, in Ade’s best posh-knob voice. “Did you put that on for me or the show?”

“Yes, ha-ha, we can’t all laze around in our middle-aged old people’s clothes.”

Ade swallowed, his mouth feeling dry as his booze-fogged brain tried to do the dangerous thing of forming a thought. 

Surely, Rik was middle-aged too? 

But Ade could _see_ Rik, and Rik was as young as Ade could ever remember him being, a perfect match to the git who was currently prancing around on the telly screen. Rik’s hair was almost shaven on the sides, stupid disgusting rat-tails hanging off the back. Ade remembered him whinging as the make-up lady tied them too tight on the first day of filming and how Ade didn’t give two shits because the jammy bastard didn’t have to have fucking metal things fucking _glued_ to his fucking forehead with what must have been fucking araldite. 

“Rik, how old even are you?”

Rik opened his mouth to reply, but then there was an explosion on screen and Ade found it impossible not to laugh at how fucking stupid it was, how mental the entire situation, so when Jennifer arrived (having cut the weekend short because, really, Ade was an idiot and she would much rather he was being an idiot where she could keep an eye on him) and saw her husband, 14 cans down and giggling like a child at his own ancient work, no one could really blame her for carting him off to bed and gently popping two sleeping tablets into his mouth with a kiss.

-

“WAKE UP, FATTY.”

Adrian struggled against the hypnotic affect of diazepam, pulling his eyes open with his thumbs and forefingers. Rik was staring at him, wide-eyed, prodding him in the skull.

“Ow.”

“You could never take your booze,” Rik said, waggling his finger. “I told you to go easy.”

“I think,” Adrian said, before putting his hand to his mouth just to make sure he wasn’t going to throw up in his best mate’s face. “I think your exact words were ‘why don’t you try the pernod? No, of course it hasn’t gone off, just because it’s solid’.”

“Well _I_ wasn’t going to drink it, was I?” Rik scoffed at the idea. 

Adrian shut his eyes again, but the poking resumed, as did the thundering headache.

“Ow! Fuck off!”

“Darling, are you awake?”

“Shit,” Rik hissed, rolling his eyes. “Why’d you have to make so much noise?” He crossed his arms and walked behind the opening door, flicking Vs at Jennifer as she slowly walked in, a waning smile beginning on her face.

“Hello, darling,” Ade mumbled. “I think I overdid it last night.”

“Yes,” Jennifer said, stroking his head. It was soothing, but not nearly as relaxing considering Rik wrenching in the corner. “Just a bit. But it’s okay. You needed to get it out of your system. Do you want me to get the paracetamol?”(3)

Adrian nodded and rolled over, steadfastly ignoring Rik’s attempts to sabotage which was, by all their weird accounts, a sweet moment. Jennifer took her time in leaving, picking up the (thankfully, still empty) bucket by Ade’s side of the bed. Adrian was allowed a few blissful seconds of silence before Rik ran around to him and poked him in the face again.

“You are aware, I suppose,” Rik said, almost shaking with anger, his fist bobbing up and down in Ade’s eyesight. “That getting married is the first sign of being a raging queen?”

“Fuck off,” Ade said, slurring, pulling a pillow over his head in an effort to keep Rik out. “You’re a bastard and I hate you. And why are you dressed like some sort of elf?”

“Oh, that’s very rich, isn’t it? _I’m_ the bastard. _You_ hate _me_. As if _your_ over drinking was completely _my_ fault!”

“It is your fault!”

“…Darling?”

Adrian peered out from underneath his pillow, where Jennifer looked slightly confused, a glass of water fizzing in her hand.

“Sorry, love. Just… doing lines.”

_“OF COCAINE. WE’RE ON COCAINE! HARD DRUGS FOR THE HAMMERSMITH HARD MEN.”_

“Hmm,” Jennifer said. Ade knew she wasn’t entirely convinced. 

But Jennifer was never really going to understand, was she? She didn’t understand Rik the way Ade understood Rik - no one really, honestly could. Not even Ben, who could churn out scripts the way catholics churned out kids, not even he could understand how what they wrote worked so well and how they meshed. No one else had a Rik.

“Sorry, I really am.” Ade asked, trying to ignore Rik, who was dancing around, shouting “EVERYONE PAY ATTENTION TO ME.”

“I told you, it's alright. Do you mind if I take a shower? I didn’t want to wake you earlier.”

Adrian shook his head and lifted his mouth for a quick kiss. Jennifer took the door to the en suite, and Adrian caught Rik’s eye.

“No," Adrian warned.

Rik grinned lecherously, waggling his fingers.

“I said no, Rik,” Ade said, holding out a hand. “She’s my wife.”

Rik pouted and rolled his eyes. “God, you’re so _boring_ now. Do you know, When you passed out, she took off your clothes? Changed your underwear? Who the fuck even thinks to do that? I was sitting here, just wanting a boy’s night in with me on the telly and you watching me on the telly and telling me how great I am, and you bring a _girl_ into it. A girl who gives me a big old view of your nob. Great. Bloody brilliant.”

Adrian waited until he heard the water go on next door to reply.

“You didn’t have to be here, you know, to watch my nob like some nob guardian.”

“Oh? So I should go?”

Adrian’s heart fell three storeys. “No. Stay.”

“And watch your nob? Or your naked girl? Because I don’t know what Stephen’s been telling you, but that blow-job I gave him was very heterosexual.”

Adrian swallowed and sat up, the daylight creeping around the black-out curtains making things a little clearer. Rik was staring at him, arms folded, wearing the lurid green colour that he would just _know_ would make Adrian seven kinds of sea-sick when he was this hungover. His head wasn’t the exact right shade of orange, but it was bloody close enough. (4)

“You’re Fredding me, aren’t you?” Adrian said, coldly. “You’re my mental illness, my imaginary friend. Some fucked up ghost.” His heart skipped a beat, becoming a dark, solid stone in his chest, as everything wrapped together again in a mis-shapen, fucked up reality.

“Haven’t I always been?” Rik grinned, taking a deep bow before legging it into the bathroom. “Blimey! Look at those! Fu-u-uck.”

-

Three days of Rik-the-ghost. Three bloody days.(5)

Ade acted as normal as possible with Rik dancing around him, commenting on everything he felt fit to comment on. Usually, birds or himself, or himself with birds. He was particularly habitual to air-shagging any woman Ade encountered, which led to a giggling fit in Waitrose that the kind cashier looked at him sympathetically for, as if grief had turned him into a basket case incapable of buying bog roll.(6)

Rik was a pain in the arse, but it was still better than no-one being there at all. The papers had moved onto the next big news story, which pissed off Rik to no end, but at least gave Ade the chance to start reading through his emails and delete anything that was requesting a quote. If anything, it was better to wade through the fucking ocean of platitudes and condolences with Rik over his shoulder, swearing.

“That utter freeloading bastard!” Rik said, pointing at the screen. “He wouldn’t ever fucking book us in the old days, now he’s a fucking eye-witness to my Christing rise? Kill him for me. _Murder_ him.”

“No.”

“For Jesus' sake! What the fuck is the point in this ghost lark if I can’t get you to fucking kill people? Bo-or-or-or-ring.”

Ade only slept when Jennifer gave him tablets, which managed to knock him out enough to sleep through Rik’s incessant, nasal singing. But Ade didn’t really want to sleep. He began writing absolutely everything Rik said down, putting it into one large book that he could keep for the future. This, of course, was exactly up Rik’s alley, and he monologued for hours as Ade scrawled lines, laughing almost to tears at some of the mad shit Rik said.

It was during one of these sessions, in the bedroom where Rik liked to pace up and down and Ade liked to lie back and relax, that Jennifer had interrupted by softly knocking on the door. 

Rik, who had not warmed up to her, even after seeing her tits, rolled his eyes.

“Tell her to fuck off with a plunger up her twat.”

“What is it, darling?”

“Could you get your suit on? We need to leave in five minutes.”

“Yes, no problem.” Adrian quickly bounced to the wardrobe.

“Ooh, are we going to an award ceremony?” Rik asked. He had taken to wearing his “Richie” clothes during these sessions, ostensibly because he liked to pull on the waistband of the oversized novelty Y-fronts whilst thinking lines. 

However, as soon as Ade pulled on his suit trousers and turned around, Rik was pin-striped in classic _New Statesman_ garb, his hair curled and coiffed, his tie straight and held tight against his chest, his face bright and eager.

“Yeah, something like that.”

-

_Here lies the Rik Mayall._

_It’s not true._

The rest of the funeral party had left for the wake. Not one of them had commented on Adrian staying alone (or seemingly alone, as it was), not even Jennifer, who behaved as if she almost expected it.

The gravestone was solid black marble, bare apart from the gold writing etching the bookends of Rik’s life and his own posthumous words.

“Pathetic,” Rik muttered from behind where Adrian was kneeling, just to the side of the grave. “It was supposed to have ‘the’ underlined. You just can't get the staff.”

“I’ll get it changed,” Adrian said, staring at the stone. It was warm, almost hot. Everyone in the funeral had been baking in the heat, leaving sweat patches all over their clothes. Adrian liked that. Almost as if they had all been on stage under those ridiculous lights. Sweating like - like -

“Like we’ve all been masturbating for weeks?” Rik finished the thought.

Ade didn’t smile, although his mind brought forward the rest of his lines for that particular part of the script automatically. 

What was he supposed to do here? Say goodbye? Hadn’t he already done that? In the hospital, when it looked liked it was all over in 1998? Five days of grieving and Rik had come back in the end. Ade was sure that was enough mourning, even if it was premature by sixteen years.

“What do I say?” Ade finally asked, looking up at Rik, who was leaning on the gravestone and inspecting his fingernails, as if waiting for a bus. “What do you want me to say?”

“Tell me... Tell me I’m great,” Rik said, putting his chin on his upturned hands and grinning, the setting sun haloing his head in a way Ade was sure he knew. “Tell me I was the best thing that ever fucked his way onto British telly. Tell me I defeated Thatcher all on my own and changed history forever. Tell me that in 50 years time I’m still gonna be the metronome of drama that everyone in theatreland still sets their fucking watches to.”

“But you already know all that," Ade said. Rik looked a bit taken aback. "There's no use saying the things you already know.”

For the first time since Ade had seen Rik again, Ade could see something change in Rik’s face. 

It wasn’t for the worse. It wasn’t really for the better either. It was like someone had removed a very thin cotton curtain from over him. He was a little paler, a little less polished. A little more Richard and a little less… everyone else he had embodied.

“Okay, then," he said. "Adrian. Tell me you’re going to be alright.”

He didn’t stutter. Didn’t play the fool. Didn’t speak with any more concern than a man wondering where he’d parked his car in the local multi-storey. Didn’t even look like he needed an answer, even though he asked the question. 

Perhaps that was what made Ade think and look away, rather than keep his eyes latched onto a ghost.

Of course, when Adrian looked back, Rik was gone. 

His headstone wasn’t. Neither was the grave. 

One half of a whole, Adrian put his hand on Rik’s last physical manifestation on this earth, which helped himself up onto his feet.

“I’ll be fine, Rik," Ade said. Then looked up, at the cloudless sky, and smiled to himself. "Goodbye, you bastard.”

 

\----

\----

\----

 

(1)Jennifer, to her credit, much preferred recognising something she recognised as her husband, and held off driving back. If he had acted perfectly normal for a human being, she would have been on the road before you could say “massive mental breakdown”.

(2)Or two, if you count the other Rik, or three if you the cat that was having a nice snooze in the dresser until some bastard threw a phone at it.

(3)Jennifer and Dawn had become utter pros at cleaning up after the 20th Century Coyote gang during the 80s and they still both have “emergency writing kits” (puke bags, headache pills, swarfega, etc) which complement Ade’s “emergency period kit” (chocolate, hot water bottle, a letter pre-addressed to the MET that says ‘if I am murdered, the bitch did it’).

(4)Orange hair = Vyvyan = stained hotel sinks as he tried to wash the coloured gunge out in Adrian’s mind. He is still not completely happy with how he wasted the last few years of glorious plumage having it scraped in three different directions. Although the doctors have assured him that none of that maltreatment would have sped up his baldness, Ade cannot look at orange hair without wanting to stab something.

(5)“ _Day after day. Year in, year out. Slime in this ear, slime in that ear. Don’t you ever yearn for change?_ "

(6)Which it had.


End file.
